Separate storage groups is just a logical way I wanted to partition things, but it also lets me have more stores. There is limits on number of stores per SG. So if you want to keep your store small, which means faster to backup, less likely to corrupt, faster to do offline defrags, and just in general, comply by the "best practice guidelines, you want to split things up. It's not really a performance issue.
I've never done hotspare for RAID1. It seems kind of silly to me. Might as well just do RAID5. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Erick Thompson Sent: Tuesday, May 24, 2005 4:52 PM To: Exchange Discussions Subject: RE: Hardware recommendation for Exchange 2003 The cost comment is dead on. As I told management, you give 50k, and I'll give you five nines. :-) Why two separate storage groups? I can see distributing the load between them, but I figure I'll only do that if the performance on the single storage group isn't good enough. Having a second controller would be good, but I don't think we need that just yet. What do you think about having a hot spare for RAID1 arrays? Overkill? Thanks, Erick -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Evan Mann Sent: Tuesday, May 24, 2005 1:44 PM To: Exchange Discussions Subject: RE: Hardware recommendation for Exchange 2003 JBOD is just the external SCSI drive array for stores, it's still on setup as RAID5 with hotspare. I actually go a step further and have 2 separarte RAID5's for 2 separate storage groups, each with 3 stores. Since my JBOD is a Dell PowerVault with 2 controller cards, and my SCSI controller for it is dual channel. Ideally, it would be 2 separate single channel SCSI controllers to the JBOD, so I have redundancy if the SCSI controller failed. I'd only loose access to 1 storage group/set of stores instead of both. Lots of "ideal" situations, but the more ideal you get, the more $$$ it costs. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Erick Thompson Sent: Tuesday, May 24, 2005 4:41 PM To: Exchange Discussions Subject: RE: Hardware recommendation for Exchange 2003 Thanks for the overview of what you have. I think the OS and logs together makes the most sense, with the stores on a separate array. Do you think it's worthwhile to have the OS swapfile on the store array, or keep it with the OS? Also, what's the advantage of JBOD over RAID5? Thanks, Erick -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Evan Mann Sent: Tuesday, May 24, 2005 1:32 PM To: Exchange Discussions Subject: RE: Hardware recommendation for Exchange 2003 Ideally you want the OS on it's own RAID and drives, the Logs on it's own RAID and drives, and the stores on their own RAID and drives. You'd even go a step further to have each on their own controller, in a perfect world. But, I go with RAID1 for OS, RAID5 for LOGS, and RAID5 w/hotspare for stores. The OS/Logs are on internal server storage (2650) with internal RAID card and the store is an external JBOD running a separate RAID card. So I've got a mix of everything. If I didn't have this much to spend, I'd put the logs with the OS and keep the stores separate for sure. If your log's fill up the drive for some reason, it won't crash your stores if you do this. It will prevent mail flow however. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of John Aldrich Sent: Tuesday, May 24, 2005 4:15 PM To: Exchange Discussions Subject: RE: Hardware recommendation for Exchange 2003 I'm no Exchange guru, but I'd consider maybe a raid1 for the O/S and a raid5 for Exchange + DB files, log files, etc. The O/S can be quickly reinstalled and once you do that, you should be easily able to reconnect to the existing Exchange server, I would think. -----Original Message----- From: Erick Thompson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, May 24, 2005 4:08 PM To: Exchange Discussions Subject: Hardware recommendation for Exchange 2003 After a day spent without email due to a corrupted database, we're making changes to our Exchange 2003 setup. At the moment, we have a Compaq DL380, dual P3 866 with 2 gigs of RAM. There are four drive slots, with 4 36 gig drives, all set up together as a RAID 5 with a hot spare (72 total space). We have about 100 users (very heavy email usage), and are running a SharePoint portal site on the server as well. The system is heavily IO bound at the moment, so I need to do a drive reconfiguration. We're a non-profit, so I'm trying to keep hardware costs low. For Exchange 2003, do you think it would be better to have 1) Two RAID1 arrays, one for OS + Exchange + database files, and one for swapfile + log files 2) One RAID1 array with a hot spare for OS + Exchange + swapfile + log, and an external RAID5 array for database files 3) Same as #2, but with a RAID5 array instead of RAID1 4) Something else? For SharePoint, I'm thinking that a external RAID5 array would do the job, as the SQL Server backing SharePoint is what is causing the most problem. I'm trying to get the best uptime, followed by the best performance. Thanks for any help, Erick _________________________________________________________________ List posting FAQ: http://www.swinc.com/resource/exch_faq.htm Web Interface: http://intm-dl.sparklist.com/read/?forum=exchange To subscribe: http://e-newsletters.internet.com/discussionlists.html/ To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Exchange List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe via postal mail, please contact us at: Jupitermedia Corp. 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